Exclusive: Lawyer behind George Simion tells us what really happened in presidential campaign

Question: Mrs. Silvia Uscov, you coordinated the legal team of the sovereignist-conservative candidate George Simion. How do you see today, almost a month later, the legal conduct of the presidential election campaign in Romania?

Silvia Uscov: The Romanian presidential elections provided a stark illustration of the fundamental difference between running a legal campaign versus an illegal one. What we witnessed was deeply concerning: illegal campaigns appeared to have significantly higher chances of success. On the other hand, maintaining legal compliance – which our legal team meticulously ensured – represented something far more valuable: preserving democratic dignity and giving democracy a genuine opportunity to be reinstated.

The electoral period, especially the period between the two rounds of voting, was marked by countless illegalities. This forced us to develop sophisticated legal strategies that went beyond traditional approaches. For instance, we had to orchestrate situations where other candidates would engage with each other, allowing us to maintain a lower profile for several crucial days. This experience taught us that legal work in electoral contexts isn’t merely technical – it’s deeply strategic, much like chess.

Our legal team faced unprecedented challenges, particularly with emerging threats like deepfakes. We encountered a fabricated video showing Romania’s Patriarch endorsing the candidate who ultimately won, Nicușor Dan, despite the Romanian Orthodox Church maintaining official neutrality. Ironically, such endorsement seemed unlikely given that as Bucharest’s mayor, Mr. Dan, had approved a “Pride” event on the eve of a major Christian holiday, which had upset many believers.

We were also compelled to implement the newest European regulations, including those governing electoral advertising. Romania became the first EU member state to apply these rules before their full implementation through an emergency ordinance that essentially introduced a form of censorship against ordinary citizens wanting to express support for their preferred candidates.

Perhaps most disappointing was the delayed response from authorities. We filed complaints with Romania’s Constitutional Court regarding this emergency ordinance, yet no hearing date has been set even today, despite the electoral impact being immediate – particularly after a George Simion supporter was sanctioned by having his video content removed and likely facing fines.

Similarly, we challenged the Constitutional Court regarding discrimination in voting rights for Romanian citizens abroad, but again, no hearing has been scheduled, rendering the matter moot.

We filed criminal complaints for incitement to violence, hatred, and discrimination against George Simion’s supporters, as well as for spreading false information – clear disinformation that threatened national security during the electoral process by potentially manipulating voter choices. The prosecutors’ response, received just days ago, indicated insufficient evidence to open criminal cases against those who propagated such disinformation.

Paradoxically, when individuals simply exercised their freedom of expression – without any disinformation, let alone content threatening national security – they were immediately sanctioned.

This leads me to conclude that either the authorities were unprepared for such an illegal campaign, or worse, if they were prepared, they chose to collaborate with those committing these violations. This represents a fundamental threat to democratic institutions and the rule of law.

Question: Why did George Simion lose the elections?

Silvia Uscov: In chess, both players follow the same rules, move by move, in a transparent environment where every action is visible. But when your opponent floods the board with fake pieces, moves multiple times per turn, and operates in complete darkness while you’re still trying to play by the established rules, it’s no longer a game of strategy – it’s guerrilla warfare.

The candidate who chose legality was essentially showing up to a boxing match while the opponent brought weapons. We were playing three-dimensional chess while they were playing whack-a-mole with the truth. Every time we addressed one false narrative, ten more would spring up overnight through coordinated networks and artificial amplification.

It’s like trying to conduct a symphony orchestra while someone else is operating a noise machine at full volume. The beauty, precision, and harmony of legitimate political discourse gets completely drowned out by chaos deliberately designed to confuse and overwhelm voters.

The fundamental asymmetry is this: truth requires time to verify, context to understand, and nuance to appreciate. Lies can be manufactured instantly, spread virally, and designed to trigger immediate emotional responses. We were architects trying to build something solid and lasting, while they were demolition experts with dynamite.

In such an environment, the candidate who maintains legal and ethical standards isn’t just fighting an opponent – they’re fighting the degradation of the entire democratic process itself.

Question: And yet, in the first round, he got 41 per cent of the votes, twice as many as Nicușor Dan, who is now Romania’s president. What happened between the first and second rounds?

Silvia Uscov: The disinformation started subtly before the first round, like a slow poison. But when they saw the massive popular support for George Simion they panicked and unleashed a full-scale psychological bombardment on the population.

It was fear-mongering at an industrial scale. Suddenly, overnight, the narrative flooded traditional media outlets and social media networks: George Simion was ”an extremist, pro-Russian, anti-NATO, anti-EU” etc. They flooded every channel with claims that investors would flee, the economy would collapse, that Romania would be isolated internationally. It was classic shock doctrine – create enough fear and confusion that people abandon their rational decision-making.

This wasn’t just negative campaigning – this was systematic psychological manipulation designed to induce a constant state of anxiety. They understood that fear is the enemy of democratic deliberation. When people are scared, they don’t evaluate policies or character; they react emotionally to perceived threats.

The timing was surgical. They waited to see if they could win cleanly, and when the first round results showed they couldn’t, they deployed what I can only describe as information carpet bombing. 

What we witnessed was the weaponization of uncertainty itself. They didn’t need to prove their claims – they just needed to create enough doubt and fear that people would choose what seemed like the ”safer” option, even if that safety was entirely illusory. But now, one month later, the fog of fear is lifting – and even those who voted for the current President are beginning to realise they made the wrong choice.

The swing between rounds wasn’t a change of heart by the electorate – it was the result of a sophisticated disinformation campaign that effectively terrorised voters into abandoning their initial, more informed choice.

Question: What you are actually saying is that the outcome of the elections in Romania was directly influenced by the fear induced by one side to manipulate the supporters of the other side.

Silvia Uscov: Absolutely. What we witnessed was psychological manipulation exploiting the vulnerabilities of our information age. Having deep knowledge and experience in cybersecurity, AI regulations, and human rights, I’ve studied these psychological effects from a legal perspective to understand them for inclusion in policies and procedures as responses to auditor requirements, naturally working with technical teams in these fields for my corporate clients.

In today’s hyper-connected world, our brains haven’t evolved to process the volume and speed of information we receive daily. We rely on cognitive shortcuts – heuristics – to make quick decisions. Fear campaigns exploit this by triggering our most primitive survival instincts, bypassing rational thought entirely.

They weaponised several key psychological biases: anchoring bias made the first catastrophic claims the mental baseline against which everything else was measured, the bandwagon effect created false consensus – repeated messaging made people believe ”everyone reasonable” shared these fears, authority bias was crucial – ambassadors and professors legitimised narratives because people defer to perceived expertise, social proof bias – when influencers or NGOs funded by other states expressed these fears, citizens felt validated in adopting them, the halo effect transferred institutional credibility to questionable claims simply because they came from official sources.

The information ecosystem amplified this exponentially. Social media algorithms prioritise engagement, and fear generates more clicks, shares, and comments than rational policy discussion. So these narratives spread faster and wider than any factual counter-argument could.

Most crucially, they exploited loss aversion – the psychological principle that people feel losses twice as intensely as equivalent gains. The messaging wasn’t about what the current president, Mr. Dan, would deliver; it was about everything voters would supposedly lose with the other candidate, Mr. Simion.

The timing was critical – flooding the information space between rounds when people had limited time to fact-check or reflect. This wasn’t campaigning; it was designed to hijack democratic decision-making by exploiting how human psychology functions in the digital age.

Question: In Poland, Karol Nawrocki, backed by the Law and Justice party, won a truly historic victory over the liberal candidate who had an extremely powerful system behind him – a situation almost identical to Romania. What does this success mean for the conservative-sovereignist movement worldwide?

Silvia Uscov: Karol Nawrocki’s victory in Poland represents a seismic shift that extends far beyond national borders. Unlike the Romanian situation, Nawrocki had two crucial advantages: the backing of the Law and Justice party, which had governing experience, plus the support of Poland’s sitting president. 

This success signals that Central Europe is definitively embracing the conservative-sovereignist path. We’re witnessing a regional realignment where nations are rejecting the Brussels-imposed uniformity model. Italy, Hungary, Slovakia, Poland are forming a bloc that prioritises national sovereignty over federalist integration.

The geopolitical implications are profound. This isn’t just about domestic politics – it’s about the fundamental structure of the EU itself. We’re seeing the emergence of two competing visions: federalist approach (Nicușor Dan, Emmanuel Macron) that would further centralize power in Brussels, versus the model of sovereign, independent states cooperating within the EU framework (George Simion, Karol Nawrocki, Giorgia Meloni etc.).

The trend appears to favour the conservative-sovereignist approach because we are profoundly different peoples with distinct histories, cultures etc. No empire in history that attempted to homogenise such diverse cultures has survived the test of time. The Roman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, even the Soviet Union – all collapsed under the weight of trying to impose unity on diversity and not unity in diversity.

Tellingly, the EU is attempting to force this federalisation through the Court of Justice of the European Union precisely because it knows such changes would fail the test of national referendums in member states.

The conservative-sovereignist movement’s success reveals a fundamental choice: genuine cooperation between equals or imposed centralisation from above, voluntary partnership or mandated conformity, celebrating diverse strengths or demanding uniform weakness. History shows us that strong, independent nations make stronger alliances. 

Question: One part of the world supports national values, conservative principles, the family, freedom, faith, while the other part is in favour of so-called progressive ideas, which are in fact neo-Marxist, internationalist and ultra-liberal. It seems like an irreconcilable division. 

Silvia Uscov: What we’re witnessing isn’t just political polarisation – it’s a civilisational fault line that’s reshaping the global order. The recent conflicts have crystallised this division: you have nations defending traditional sovereignty, cultural identity, and organic social structures on one side, and on the other, a globalist project that seeks to dissolve these distinctions in favour of technocratic uniformity.

This division manifests differently across regions. In Central Europe, it’s the memory of imposed ideologies – whether Soviet communism or now Brussels bureaucracy – that drives resistance to any system that claims to know better than local communities. In Western Europe, decades of prosperity have created societies more willing to experiment with post-national identities, but even there, populist movements are gaining ground.

The irony is profound: the so-called ”progressive” camp often employs distinctly illiberal methods – censorship, economic coercion, judicial overreach – to advance what they claim are liberal values. Meanwhile, the ”conservative” camp increasingly champions the classical liberal principles of free speech, democratic sovereignty, and individual liberty that the progressives have abandoned. This extends to a fundamental reimagining of human rights themselves – the progressive vision treats rights as communitarian and autocratic, determined by collective identity and enforced by institutional decree, while the conservative approach returns to the original conception of rights as inherently individual, universal, and existing prior to any government or collective that might seek to define or limit them.

The division may indeed be irreconcilable because it’s not really about policy disagreements – it’s about fundamentally different anthropological visions. One sees humans as infinitely malleable beings who can be perfected through ”the right” institutions and ideas. The other sees humans as rooted in particular places, cultures, and relationships that give life meaning and perceive them as individuals with human rights.

Question: Where are we heading?

Silvia Uscov: We’re moving toward a multipolar world where these competing visions will crystallize into distinct blocs. Eastern Europe presents a fascinating paradox – while politically led by progressive governments, there’s powerful conservative-sovereignist opposition brewing beneath the surface. Rather than isolation, I see inevitable influence from the Central European axis. Italy or Poland’s success creates a magnetic pull that transcends current political arrangements. Cultural and values affinities run deeper than temporary political leadership, and the conservative-sovereignist wave is likely to spread as populations witness the stark difference between nations that defend their identity and those that surrender it to external diktat.

Romania represents a compelling case in this regard – a nation of citizens with genuinely liberal principles, forged through the sacrifice of those who fought for democratic ideals during the 1989 Revolution. These are people who understand the true value of democracy precisely because they paid for it in blood, making them discerning partners who can distinguish between authentic democratic governance and its technocratic and bureaucratic imitation. When nations with such democratic credentials choose the conservative-sovereignist path, it validates the movement’s legitimacy on the global stage.